Republican Voters: No Return to Pre-Trump Mindset

At the Bulwark, Sarah Longwell argues that one of the clearest results of her many focus groups of Republican voters is that they don’t want to turn the clock back to the time before Donald Trump. She writes, “The Republican party has been irretrievably altered and, as one GOP voter put it succinctly, ‘We’re never going back.’”

And this basically dooms candidates such as Mike Pence and Nikki Haley who are running as if the pre-Trump world still existed. She quotes voters who identify these candidates as “pre-2016” throwbacks, one voter saying of Haley: “She would just be right back to the Paul Ryan, John Boehner kind of a thing. That’s a no-go for me.”

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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At the Bulwark, Sarah Longwell argues that one of the clearest results of her many focus groups of Republican voters is that they don’t want to turn the clock back to the time before Donald Trump. She writes, “The Republican party has been irretrievably altered and, as one GOP voter put it succinctly, ‘We’re never going back.’”

And this basically dooms candidates such as Mike Pence and Nikki Haley who are running as if the pre-Trump world still existed. She quotes voters who identify these candidates as “pre-2016” throwbacks, one voter saying of Haley: “She would just be right back to the Paul Ryan, John Boehner kind of a thing. That’s a no-go for me.”